I found myself revisiting the Parent Child dimension quite unexpectedly. I'm working on a project which involves the division of the city to different statistical areas. The division of the city into these different statistical areas happens once every 10 years or so, according to the changes in population tracked by the municipality itself and the government in the Census of Population and Housing. Up till now, my cube had in it just the statistical areas distribution from one Census onwards...
A Parent - Child Dimension is a special sort of dimension, to be used in case: You have data even for non – leaf members. For instance, you may have set – up costs allocated for the Category level (the higher level), but profit data for your Product level (the lower level). You have an unbalanced hierarchy. The classic example for this might be the Geographical Hierarchy which at times might look like: Country > State > City, and at other times like Country > City. For an international company...